Conway Research Introduces Underdog Woof, a Compact Text-to-Speech Model on Hugging Face
Conway Research has released Underdog Woof, a new English text-to-speech (TTS) model available on Hugging Face. This model is notable for its small size, operating from a single 40.6 MB file, and its ability to run on a laptop CPU using only numpy. Underdog Woof features two voices, Juno and Mira, and is designed to accurately read phone numbers, dates, prices, and codes as they would be spoken naturally. The model includes a built-in rule-based normalizer to handle these elements, eliminating the need for external libraries. It also manages long texts by splitting them into sentences and further segmenting sentences over 120 characters at commas, semicolons, or dashes to optimize audio generation. The model's performance metrics indicate a low word error rate of 1.42% for the Mira voice on Gradium TTS Hard Cases, making it more accurate than many larger models while being significantly smaller.